NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden accused Australia of undertaking mass surveillance of its citizens and passing laws on the collection of metadata that he says do not protect society from acts of terrorism.

Snowden, addressing the Progress 2015 conference in Melbourne via
satellite link, criticized Australia's new metadata laws, which
allow the government and intelligence agencies to keep a constant
watch on citizens.

"What this means is they are watching everybody all the
time,” the former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower said.
“They're collecting information and they're just putting it
in buckets that they can then search through not only locally,
not only in Australia, but they can then share this with foreign
intelligences services.”

Last month, Australia passed controversial laws that require
telecommunications firms to retain their customers’ phone and
computer metadata for two years.

Snowden decried this disturbing trend, warning that regardless of
what you are doing “you're being watched."

He compared Australia's mass surveillance system to that being
used in the UK.

"Australia's role in mass surveillance around the world is
similar to the UK and the Tempora program," he said.

Snowden, who has been living in Moscow since June 2013 after
receiving political asylum, criticized the Australian
government’s passage of a metadata program that is being used, he
said, to “collect everyone's communications in advance of
criminal suspicion."

"This is dangerous," he told the conference.

The former system administrator for the CIA said such invasive
surveillance technologies had nothing in common with traditional
liberal societies.

Aside from average citizens, he warned that journalists are also
at risk of having their contacts exposed by the mass
surveillance.

"Under these mandatory metadata laws you can immediately see
who journalists are contacting, from which you can derive who
their sources are."

He excoriated such a turn of events, saying the purpose of a free
press in society is to “act as an adversary against the
government on behalf of the public."

Snowden’s comments came on the same day that a US federal appeals
court ruled the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone
records was illegal. In a unanimous decision, the Second Circuit
Court of Appeals in New York called the bulk phone records
collection "unprecedented and unwarranted."

The ruling, which Snowden called “extraordinarily
encouraging,” comes as Congress confronts a June 1 deadline
to renew a section of the Patriot Act that allows the NSA’s bulk
data surveillance.

Meanwhile, Snowden seems determined to reveal more information
from the National Security Agency (NSA) files, hinting there was
yet more information about Australia’s intelligence work that
would be revealed at a later date.